Although Constantine was interested in the Council from a political point of view, and although he evidently got what he wanted from it, he did not simply walk away from Nicaea with the creed and consider the matter at an end. His letters written after the Council are important evidence for his attitude during it.

The library of John Blacman represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of devotional and mystical writings known to have been owned by any individual in late medieval England. On that ground alone it would merit attention. Buthis library repays study for other reasons. Firstly it is possible to place it within a detailed context. We know a considerable amount about Blacman himself and this knowledge of the man is paralleled by our knowledge of his books. Our perception of the private libraries of late medieval England is normally based on bald lists of books, occasionally supplemented by a handful of surviving manuscripts. These lists are usually derived from wills, which can all too frequently be shown to be seriously defective as a complete record of the libraries concerned. And, in particular, such lists can give only a static and skeletal picture of the relationship between the books and their owners. However, in the case of Blacman's library, while our major source is indeed a list of his books, it is a list which is exceptionally revealing. To some extent this is because part of the list is more informative than usual in providing the complete contents, insteadof a single portmanteau title, for about a third of the books. Hence we can reconstruct the precise nature of a number of the composite volumes in the library. More important is the fact that we have, properly speaking, not This article began life, in very different form, as a paper given to the Exeter Conference on ‘The medieval mystical tradition in England’. I am much indebted to the kindness and forbearance of the editor of the conference proceedings, Miss Marion Glasscoe.

Repeatedly in the course of the later Middle Ages latent resentment against the clergy, its privileges and behaviour exploded in outbursts of hatred and violence in the German cities. Late medieval Magdeburg saw some of the ugliest manifestations of this kind. In 1325 its citizens murdered their archbishop. In 1402 they surged looting and burning through the ecclesiastical quarter of the city, threatening violence to the clergy. Magdeburg was no isolated case. The bishop, chapter and clergy of Worms informed the council of Frankfurt in the Spring of 1386 how the citizens of Worms had beaten and thrown in prison priests and prelates, set fire to chapels, monasteries and churches and stolen religious items of great value. During the heyday of the Leagues of the Rhenish and Swabian Cities in the 1380s the laity in Basle, Cologne, Worms, Speyer and Mainz, no longer fearing the clergy's powerful friends, vented their pent-up hatreds. As the clerical author of the Chronicon Moguntinum explained they took revenge on the clergy ‘and thus they persecuted them more than the Jews, not caring for the princes of the land, but following their own volitions’. Time and again tempers flared and ecclesiastical property was burned, ecclesiastics were beaten or faced with a choice between self-imposed exile and abridgement of their privileges.

In the early eighteenth century, the legacy of conflict among English Protestants found an outlet in the controversy over ‘occasional conformity’. During the years 1702–4, Tory backbenchers in the House of Commons introduced a series of bills designed to strengthen the Corporation and Test Acts (1661, 1673), which had required all officials of local government and holders of Crown appointments to adhere to the established Church of England. Since the passage of these legal tests, Protestant Nonconformists seeking office had circumvented their intent by taking communion in an Anglican parish as seldom as once a year, while attending meetings of their fellow dissenters for worship. So long as they procured a certificate of conformity from the minister, they were eligible for government positions, and dissenters had gained control of several parliamentary boroughs.

In January 1736 an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title, The Alliance between Church and State, or the Necessity of an Established Religion, and a Test Law demonstrated. Its author was William Warburton, a well-to-do but still comparatively obscure country clergyman. Although this was only his second publication in the field of divinity, he was already revealing the taste for controversy which was to characterise his literary career. The Alliance appeared at the height of the campaign by the Protestant dissenters to repeal the Test Act of 1673, and only weeks before the defeat, on 12 March 1736, of a motion for its repeal in the House of Commons. Clearly intending his work as a contribution to this debate Warburton was concerned less with giving an account of the relationship between Church and State than with providing a coherent and forceful justification both of the establishment of the Church of England and of the defence of that establishment by the Test Act. In the preface he claimed to treat the subject ‘abstractedly’.